[Pkg-octave-devel] Bugs in octave2.1

[Thomas Weber]

On Sat, Jan 03, 2009 at 07:02:57PM +0100, Rafael Laboissiere wrote:
> * Thomas Weber <thomas.weber.mail at gmail.com> [2009-01-03 18:25]:
> 
> > On Fri, Jan 02, 2009 at 03:01:05PM -0500, John W. Eaton wrote:
> > > With GNU ld, I think all you need to do is use the -soname=NAME
> > > option.  Adding that to the Octave build process should be fairly
> > > simple.  I think the hard part is doing the right thing when the
> > > internals change.  Currently, we don't care much.  Each new version of
> > > Octave comes with a new set of libraries and we only have a weak
> > > promise about compatibility with any previous versions.
> > 
> > Changing the SONAME with every version in the development tree wouldn't
> > be a problem at all. What I don't want is distribution-specific
> > versioning, ie we doing it one way, Fedora in another and Gentoo yet
> > again something different.
> > 
> > Of course, stability in the stable releases would be nice, but is not
> > necessary. This is more about tracking against which version of Octave a
> > specific package was compiled.
> 
> I agree with Thomas here.  For now, only the DOG packages have files needing
> to link against liboctave and liboctinterp.  

That is not true anymore and part of the problem:
There's at least shogun linking against Octave
http://packages.debian.org/sid/amd64/shogun-octave-modular/filelist

The shogun maintainer has no knowledge about Octave, he just builds the
interface.

> We are rebuilding the packages for every new version of Octave
> already, so that Thomas' proposal above will not imply changes in our
> work flow.

I hope it would :) 
A simple rebuild would just require a binNMU request to our release, no
need for uploading over my pretty slow connection.

> On the other hand, if other packages outside the DOG start making use of the
> libraries, then the upstream authors will need to be more careful about
> changing the SONAME, I think.

We will need to treat liboctave as a library and maybe change our
packaging.

	Thomas